The last time we reported on the rather irresponsible waste of energy at the currently unoccupied 32 New Lane site, we asked Councillor Pike, Amazon’s main man at HBC, for comment:
“The outside and car park lights are all movement sensitive, and should only come on when movement occurs, reducing to 10% power when no activity is occurring. As the vast majority of vehicle movements will be during working hours, this should mean low levels of lighting at night.
I’m expecting a considerable improvement when the lighting scheme is working as intended, but I will continue to monitor the situation over the next couple of weeks.”
Cllr Tim Pike 16-1-2023
Thinking we’d monitor it too, we sent our cub reporter out to take a picture, just to provide a bit of a benchmark:
On 28 January, Cllr. Pike reported that he’d already seen great improvement at first hand!
“I went and checked yesterday at 8.30pm, and the overall lighting is considerably dimmed compared to when they were first installed. This would lead me to believe that the developer has got the system working correctly and that the lights are dimmed when there is no activity taking place.”
Cllr. Tim Pike 28 January 2023
Two days later, we sent the cub reporter out again late on a Monday evening and – surprise surprise! – nothing seemed to have changed at all. Indeed, the lights have been burning like this since Christmas and as you can see, there’s absolutely nobody at work up there. Cllr. Pike must have been mistaken again.
In fact, nothing changed until the BBC picked up the story a couple of days ago.
Once again, we sent the now rather weary cub reporter to the site again with his camera late on a Sunday evening and guess what? The excellent news is that Chinese spy balloons can no longer see Amazon Havant from space.
We can still see it down here though, just as bright as it always was. Still, at least they’ve found the switch for the top floor now!
Which just goes to show, if you want anything done around here, you might find asking a journalist more productive than asking your local councillor.
Thank you Toby.
By the way, considering all this unnecessary use of energy, we thought we’d ask Scottish and Southern Energy whether the electricity consumption from the Amazon site, including its built-in infrastructure for up to 900 concurrent EV chargers and a shed load of computers, robots, belt drives and conveyors, might have a detrimental impact on supply for local residential consumers.
We’ll let you know.
Havant Civic Society 
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